Julie and I like to go on walks. There’s a small path behind my apartment building, a little stretch of forest smudged between two apartment complexes—mine and hers. She walks through it when she wants to see me, and we return to it together. We walk, always touching, pinkies intertwined and shoulders bumping.
I move in an angle around her, my body unconsciously bending into her.
I’ve never been on the path alone, and I’m glad for that fact because I don’t think I could navigate it. It changes every time I step foot on it. It’s as if time moves faster for it, the plants grow separate from the season outside. I can watch, standing still, as the path erodes and shifts as it would naturally over time as if it’s on a time lapse.
We sneak out of the house at night, even though we have no one to catch us. We walk to the gas station (even though we both have cars and can drive) and we spend what little money we have on shitty chips and eat it on the path. I leave my wrappers on the ground, it will swallow them either way; but Julie always neatly folds hers into small squares and pockets them. After, she walks me home, and walks back into the path.
We buried a bird my cat brought in on that path:
It happened after a fight, not rare for us, but I don’t remember what started it. She remained quiet as she always does, but my voice kept raising. My hands moved before I thought to stop them.
Julie went still. There was a moment where I could have stepped back, apologized, done anything else.
I didn’t.
The bird was still warm when my cat dropped it at our feet, a small, impossible offering. Its chest ripped open, heart visible, I watched as it stuttered out. Julie crouched immediately. I stayed standing, arms crossed, adrenaline still buzzing, my body looking for somewhere to put the leftover violence.
“It’s dead,” I said, uselessly.
“I know,” she said, already digging with her hands. The soil gave easily, like it had been waiting. I watched her fingers darken with dirt and felt something hollow open in my chest. The bird looked like it had fallen out of time, like it had been sped through something it wasn’t meant to survive.
We buried it without ceremony. Julie laid it down gently, folded its wings in, and covered it. I didn’t help until the end, when I pressed the dirt flat with my palm, harder than necessary. The path shifted under us as it always did, leaves rearranging themselves, roots inching closer to the surface. A reminder, I thought, that nothing stays where you put it.
Julie stood, wiped her hands on her jeans, and left without a word. I didn’t ask her to stay. That would have required admitting I was afraid.
I watched her walk away until the dark swallowed her. Then I was alone on the path for the first time.
It moved immediately. Trees leaned. The ground softened, then thinned. The trail I knew blurred at the edges, like it was being erased faster than I could track. I tried to follow where Julie had gone, but every step took me somewhere else. My breathing went ragged. I stood still, and the forest kept moving. .
The sky moves in regular time, I watch as my body unravels and decomposes and feels the ache of aging, but the sun remains crawling across the sky. It sets slowly, to me this is at a snails pace—I’m already sprouting weeds. The ground welcomed me the way it had welcomed the bird. Roots threaded through me. Green insisted itself out of what I’d left behind.
Julie comes back the next morning, and walks past the shrub that is now my body, she doesn’t even blink twice at the few splinters of bone I’ve left behind.
She knocks on my door and I open it immediately.
When we return back to the path, it’s unrecognizable once again.
